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    O Pioneers!
    O Pioneers!
    O Pioneers!
    Audiobook6 hours

    O Pioneers!

    Written by Willa Cather

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength, courage, and resolve, Alexandra fights long and hard to transform her father's patch of raw, wind-blasted prairie into a highly profitable business.

    A gripping saga of love, murder, greed, failure, and triumph, O Pioneers! vividly portrays the hardships of prairie life. Above all, it champions the belief that hard work is the surest road to personal fulfillment. Described upon publication in the New York Times as "American in the best sense of the word," O Pioneers! celebrates the men and women who struggled to build a nation that is both compelling and contradictory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 14, 2010
    ISBN9781400189403
    Author

    Willa Cather

    Born in 1873, Willa Cather was raised in Virginia and Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska she established herself as a theatre critic, journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh whilst also writing short stories and poems. She then moved to New York where she took a job as an investigative journalist before becoming a full-time writer. Cather enjoyed great literary success and won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours. She’s now best known for her Prairie trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia. She travelled extensively and died in New York in 1947.

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    Reviews for O Pioneers!

    4/5

    105 ratings82 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I feel obligated to say that it wasn't by any means due to the writing, references, or classic applicability of this book that it got a two star rating (I'm calling it a 2.5). It is simply because, although interesting, it was hard pressed to keep my attention for long periods of time. I would still recommend it if you are interested in early colonial mid-west historical fiction!
    • 1/5
      Had to read it for an American Lit class in college. So boring.
    • 4/5
      Coming back to read this book for a second time reminded me that when I first read Willa Cather – many years ago – she took me to a time and place I had known nothing about and she made me realise that there were more sides to classic writing than I had realised.Before I read her books the only American woman author I knew was Louisa May Alcott ….Enthused by my new discovery I read every single book I could find in a short space of time, not really stopping to think about the arc of her storytelling life or how one book related to another.Now that I have come back to her work, reading all of her books in chronological order and thinking about them a little more along the way, I can say that though she hadn’t reached the peak of her powers when she wrote this, her second book, it is a wonderful work and a very fine demonstration of what she could do.Her writing is sparse and yet it says so much so clearly. It speaks profoundly of the consequences of travelling to a new life in America, of the harsh realities of pioneer life, and of particular lives lived.Alexandra Bergson travelled from Sweden to Nebraska as a child with her parents and siblings. Her father knew little about farming, he was ill-equipped for the new life he had chosen, but was intelligent, he saw so many possibilities, and he was prepared to work hard to make a better future for his family.Lou and Oscar, his first two sons, had no interest in farm work and could see no potential in the land. Alexandra could, she saw the same things, she had the same love for the land as her father. He appreciated that, and when he died he left her a controlling interest in the family estate. Her brother were appalled when she invested in more and more land as other farmers gave it up to return to the city or to safer, more fertile country.She had faith in its future.Her faith was justified.Twenty years later Alexandra was the mistress of a prosperous and unencumbered empire, and head of her own household. She loved being part of the pioneer community and that community had loved and respected her; she appreciated the old ways, and she was always ready to give her time and to take trouble for her friends and neighbours.Lou and Oscar were both married and established in new lives, enjoying the fruits of the family success without really appreciating what their sister had done. It was her younger brother, Emil, who was the apple of Alexandra’s eye, her hope for the future, and she was so pleased that she was able to send him to university.She loved the land, but she understood that the life she had chosen might not be the life that her brother would want.Alexandra was a strong, practical and intelligent woman who had a wonderful understanding of her world and who cared deeply for the people whose lives touched hers. She loved her life but there were times when she was lonely, when she wished that she had a husband and family of her own, and when she even wondered if the struggles she had made to tame the land that she loved had been worthwhile.She was still close to Carl Linstrom, the best friend of her childhood, but his family had been one of those that gave up the pioneering life and returned to the city, and that had taken Carl into a very different world. He understood Alexandra better than anyone else though, and was his support Alexandra the courage to face the future after something devastating happened.It happened because though there was much that was stable and certain in Alexandra’s world, but not everything. Her younger friend, Marie, who was young and bright, who had such hopes and dream, realised that her impulsive marriage had been a mistake and that she would have to live with the consequences. When Emil came home he had changed, and his own hopes and dreams were something that he could never share with his sister.The telling of this story is utterly so. Willa Cather painted her characters and their world so beautifully and with such depth that it became utterly real. Everything in this book lived and breathed. Every emotion, every nuance was right. I lived this story with Alexandra, Emil, Marie, and their friends and neighbours.I can’t judge them or evaluate them, because I feel too close to them. I’m still thinking of them not as characters but as people I have come to know well and have many, complex feelings about.The story is beautifully balanced, with many moments of happiness – and even humour – coming from successes, from the observance of old traditions, and simply from the joy of being alive in the world.It’s a simple story with a very conventional narrative. In some ways it’s a little simplistic, but it’s very well told.Willa Cather had still to grow as a writer.And yet it feels completely right ….
    • 5/5
      Life on the divide is tough. We know this as it is written, " The records of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches of time left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.John Bergson is dying and he tells his daughter Alexandra he wants her to run the farm when he is gone. She has 3 brothers Emil, Lou and Oscar but everyone knows that it is Alexandra who expresses herself best in soil. John passes on and the family farm prospers for three years after his death but then hard times come. Families around them are selling out and leaving the divide but Alexandra goes down south to look at land and she comes back and talks her brothers into mortgaging the farm so they can buy up more land. Sixteen years after Johns death his wife dies. The farms are now prosperous so the inheritance is divided among the 4 children. Sadly, the coveting expressed in childhood extends into adulthood and ends in tragedy. And, the story comes full circle as Carl is there at the end to help Alexandra, just as he was in the beginning.
    • 5/5
      What a wonderful novel. It's the story of a Bohemian farm girl in Nebraska who runs the family farm with her father from the time she is 12, and on her own after he dies. Her ideas make the family rich, but she isn't appreciated by her two dull-witted brothers. It's also two love stories, one between Alexandra and her childhood friend and another that involves her best friend Maria and...well...I don't want to give too much away.
    • 3/5
      The story of French/Bohemian immigrants to the American West in the late 19th century. I have read much about western settlement and this book did not live up to it's hype. This was mostly a book about interpersonal relationships and not about actual settlement. By this time they had mechanized farming (except tractors) and telephones; not really pioneers, in my mind. This certainly was not on the level of The Little House Books or Sara Donati books. This was my 2nd (and last) Cather book I've read that really wasn't interesting. 198 pages
    • 4/5
      Uncharacteristically, I managed to read more than half of this novel without reading the back of book blurb. When I did and saw the word "murder" I laughed. How could such a quiet, deliberate book lead to such a harsh, unforgiving word? Masterfully, it turns out.

      Cather's strength is description. Her descriptions of nature are especially detailed and evocative. But, she's at her best when she is underplaying events, using a few well chosen words to pinpoint emotions. Beautiful and surprising, O Pioneers! will stay with me for a while.
    • 3/5
      A realist tale of Swedish immigrants living on the Nebraskan plains, their lives, and their hardships, Cather expertly paints a vivid, natural picture of pioneer life, not one embellished, but one fully developed. Truly captures the spirit of pioneer life.
    • 3/5
      I always had in the back of mind while I was reading this book that it had been written in a much more conservative time. I suspect that it pushed the limits more back then than it feels to be doing now, especially in regard to women's rights. I was struck by how undated the writing was, not stiff in any way, but not exactly free-spirited either. At times, the narrative is quite eloquent, but it had too many wordy, bland passages for me to forgive its variable quality. For the most part, I chock that up to this being an early work for a gifted writer. I expect to enjoy My Antonia even more.
    • 5/5
      I can't begin to tell you how appropriate Willa Cather's work is to my life. This requires a blog, and I may or may not include Willa's My Antonia altogether in one blog. To be continued.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book . The landscape is such a feature, a thing of beauty and threat and the promise of hard work. The way of life is portrayed brilliantly, a unique subgroup of Swedish immigrants to the US , their language, culture, habits of dress and food, all fascinating . The role of women is shown through their work, family and personal relationship ships.a very powerful, moving novel.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure that I care for Cather's work very much, this being the second novel of hers I've read. Something felt lacking here, the characters didn't connect or feel fully developed. The novel suffers from a naivety that likely is representative of the time (and Cather's feminine sentimentality). Several times I was reminded of a watered down (and prude) D. H. Lawrence, another writer I find to be dull despite his mastery of language. Cather has a few poetical moments but not enough to glue the scattered narrative together. I just don't think this novel holds up for contemporary readers.
    • 5/5
      Wow. This book... it kind of blew me away. Reading it evoked such strong mental images, it was almost like the book in my hands was a movie in my head. I read "Shadows on the Rock" once, but I don't remember it having this kind of effect.

      I also liked the way the characters are reintroduced in each section. Especially the first two sections, the characters are described with indefinite articles, so they appear more at a distance and unfamiliar to us readers. Because of this, the changes in their character are highlighted. We can be pretty sure the character is the protagonist we think it is,but it isn't completely certain until we actually read the name.

      So, basically, I thought this book was really, really well written. Also, it re-whetted my appetite for Midwestern American Pioneer history. I'll have to re-read all of the Little House books sometime soon.
    • 5/5
      The story of a strong female pioneer. It must have really hurt to have her brothers dismiss her contribution because she was a women.
    • 4/5
      Hmmm....being a chemist in college I never had to read this book as part of a scholastically driven forced march. That being said, I picked this up in St. Charles on a whim and when I finished it I was pleasantly surprised. I'd expected a celebration of mother earth (which was in there) or a hymn to nature (which is there too), but I got a dark tale of late requited illicit love between Marie Shabata and Emil, adultery and murder. Touché Willa!
    • 3/5
      The story of French/Bohemian immigrants to the American West in the late 19th century. I have read much about western settlement and this book did not live up to it's hype. This was mostly a book about interpersonal relationships and not about actual settlement. By this time they had mechanized farming (except tractors) and telephones; not really pioneers, in my mind. This certainly was not on the level of The Little House Books or Sara Donati books. This was my 2nd (and last) Cather book I've read that really wasn't interesting. 198 pages
    • 4/5
      The descriptive manner of the rider in bringing to light how it is living on the plains.
    • 4/5
      This book was a pleasant surprise -- I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Written 100 years ago, its observations of human foibles are still apt.
    • 3/5
      *This review includes plot spoilers.*I was reluctant to read Cather because her works seemed regional and dated, but after reading "O Pioneers!" I concur with other reviewers that the regionalism is actually its best feature. The prairie becomes a major character, probably even the book's most nuanced one. Cather skilfully establishes the prairie frontier's power from the opening sentence. ("One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska plain, was trying not to be blown away.") In light of its regional flavor, I enjoyed the book more than I'd expected.However, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading a children's novel, partly because of the plucky, precociously wise protagonist whose every decision turns out to be the right one despite the naysaying of her older brothers, and partly because it begins with young Alexandra trying to get young Emil's kitten down from a telephone pole. I cringed when the book's first line of dialogue was "My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!" (No typos, folks: that's "fweeze" with a W.) Real protagonists, like real people, have flaws and experience setbacks; Alexandra Bergson doesn't, with the exception of her brother's death, and even then she carries on after reaching the peculiar conclusion that she and Emil are both more to blame for Emil's death than the guy who shot him, a stance that seems incredible and nonhuman for the sister of a murder victim, regardless of the circumstances.Moreover, the descriptions of courtship, family life, and unrequited love are so innocent that, by today's standards, they seem bowdlerized for children. Of course, Cather can't be retroactively faulted for changing mores and modern-day literary bluntness, but questions of fault aside, it does diminish the book's appeal to this modern reader.I was preparing to give Cather tremendous credit for avoiding the easy, obvious ending of having Alexandra wind up with Carl, an ending that seemed to have been subverted until Carl's return from Alaska a mere five pages from the end. It also seemed unintentionally funny when, on the final page, Alexandra casually told Carl, "I will tell you about that afterward, after we are married." What?! He's been back in Nebraska for less than a day after a long absence, and they'd never discussed marriage before or even really been a romantic couple, yet suddenly marriage is presumed, as a tidy way to end the story; I laughed out loud because of its abruptness and, admittedly, imagining Carl's face amid the echoes of a thousand sitcom plots about men's fear of commitment.The prose is straightforward and spare, which would typically be yet another indicator of a children's book, but to me this seemed appropriate given the harshness of pioneer life and the utilitarian matter-of-factness of the pioneer characters. The stylistic element I found jarring, and a bit patronizing given its restriction to particular nationalities, was her heavy-handed representation of dialect for some characters, while the majority of characters speak fluent, standard English--all the more remarkably given that nearly all the characters, with the exception of Emil, are uneducated.Despite the above criticism, I mostly enjoyed it and am glad I read it, given its insight into pioneer life and Cather's prominence in early 20th-century American literature. I'd strongly recommend it for children, who prefer simple characters and unflawed protagonists, and for whom predictable happy endings are reassuring rather than trite. It would be hit-or-miss to recommend this book for adults.
    • 4/5
      Cather was simply brilliant at painting a picture of Nebraska as the country became tamed and the people that tamed it.
    • 5/5
      I should probably start off this review by admitting that I have not been reading Cather’s Prairie Trilogy in order, having read My Antonia around this time last year. Cather’s strength – IMO anyways – is her wonderfully descriptive prose. She knew how to paint a picture with words! Like My Antonia, Oh Pioneers! gives readers a strong female protagonist, this time in Alexandra Bergson, the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family who takes over the running of the family farm when the father dies. Like other women in Cather’s stories, Alexandra is an individual with grit and determination, valuable characteristics to have to survive and thrive in the American frontier of the early nineteenth century. Alexandra faces family struggles as her younger brothers side with societal views of the time period and feel that it is inappropriate for Alexandra to be free to do as she pleases, so very much a story about a woman claiming her rights outside of the bounds of traditional social norms of the time period. While a short novel – more a novella – the story only hits a couple of stutters/lurches to the otherwise even flow of the story. A common theme I have found in the Cather stories I have read so far is her ability to communicate to the reader the spiritual connection of land and people. Her characters are grounded, driven with a purpose and not flighty as one might find in some other novels. For me, the high points of this story are the strong female protagonist, the mosaic of immigrant characters from the “old country” that would have populated the American frontier of the time period and Cather’s wonderful, descriptive prose, written in plain, accessible language.
    • 4/5
      Cather is a wonderful writer, painting a hard-edged world in beautiful strokes. I didn't enjoy this one as much as others by her because I don't handle depressing stories especially well.
    • 3/5
      Willa Cather gives us a memorable set of archetypal characters who revolve around Mother Earth, Alexandra Bergson. Much of what happens tastes fairly bitterly of fate, and the characters are pushed into situations which force them to act at cross-purposes with happiness.What lasts is the hard-won triumph of the titular characters, the visionary and inexhaustible Alexandra most of all.
    • 4/5
      I loved Alexandra and the way she could see the true beauty of the land even as she struggled to harness it. Sad, beautiful, luminous.
    • 4/5
      An engrossing story to lose yourself in, well read.
    • 5/5
      Having tried and failed to read My Antonia a couple of times, I didn't expect to like this book a lot. So I was shocked when I started to love it. Cather's prose is tight, and her characters are gracefully drawn. Even an eccentric like Ivar doesn't get the Faulkner treatment; these people appear in strokes, gradually, and they are all the more real for it. I was enraptured by this book, almost all the way to the end. [It does really start to unravel in the final exchange between Alexandra and Carl--I don't know what that was in the service of, exactly.]
    • 4/5
      Alexandra is incredible. She was strong, and suffered at the hands of all of her brothers. The story was beautiful, even in it's sadness. The writing was poetic and kept me reading.I loved the ending. The scene where Alexandra realizes it was Jesus who she had been dreaming about for much of her life. I loved it. I was still happy when Carl came back and they agreed to get married, but I also liked the idea of Alexandra becoming a nun (it was implied that was what she was considering this.)The one thing that I didn't like was the victim blaming. Frank Shabata hurt his wife, not physically, but emotionally, for years and years. It was wrong of her and Emil to commit adultry, but two wrongs make more wrong, and I didn't like that first Frank, and then Alexandra essentially blamed Emil and Marie for Frank's murdering them. Besides the fact that this action was a mortal sin for Frank, it also prevented the two of them from repenting their own. Whether he had a temper or not, Frank should not have kept saying that it was her fault for letting him catch them. It was his fault for letting himself become bitter and suspicious. It was his fault for trying to make Marie as bitter as he. It was his fault for taking the gun with him to the orchard when he did not truly think that there were any intruders. And it was his fault for raising the gun to his shoulder and firing. The murder may not have been premeditated, but it was murder none the less. Ivar believes that the Emil and Marie are in Hell for their actions. I don't know whether they are (or whether non-fictional people in their place would be,) but they didn't deserve to die so quickly and without the chance to ask for God's forgiveness.So, basically I really enjoyed the book, but I didn't like the fact that Marie and Emil were blamed for their own murders. They were to blame for the sins they committed, yes, but not for the sins Frank committed. I do think I will be reading more Willa Cather in the future.
    • 4/5
      This is a great little novel about the plight of the immigrant farmers in Nebraska toward the end of the 19th century. I liked that the main protagonist was a woman, and a strong woman of course, who was given responsibility of managing the homestead by her dying father and used this advantage to realize her vision. It's very placid going for the first half and very pleasant as such, but the dramatic elements come in during the second half and move the story along in ways one would not at all have expected from what came before. Very well done. Makes me want to read more work by Willa Cather, and while I liked this novel very much, in the end I can't say it really moved me. Perhaps this has something to do with the ending and the moralistic attitude taken by the characters of the after a tragic outcome, which I hope was not the stance taken by the author as well.
    • 4/5
      The book starts out VERY slowly -- as in, the first half of it is not particularly engrossing reading. After those first two sections, I put it down thinking that it was just a bunch of sketches of vaguely connected scenes, with no overarching plot, and that Cather gave us no reason to care about the overly-stereotypical characters at all. But the novel really picks up in the second half. I can't quite put my finger on what changes, beyond the introduction of more lasting conflict and of something more approaching an actual story. I'm not sure that that's all that is different. Whatever it is, though, most of the end of the book is quite affecting. I do have quibbles with the book: the first half could be condensed so that the reader doesn't have to slog through so many apparently-random, somewhat dull scenes; the gist of many of the characters' longer speeches that show their interior thoughts could be gotten across to us in their actions rather than making us read stilted, artificial dialogue; and I am frankly disgusted by the judgments that Alexandra and the novel make regarding Emil's and Maria's fates. Nevertheless, this isn't a bad read. It's worth picking up for Cather's beautiful prose and for the story of the book's second half. I give it 3 1/2 stars overall, though if the first half of the book had been handled better this easily would've been at least a 4.
    • 4/5
      I picked this up at a used book sale with no idea who wrote it (me: under rock) or what it was about other than it was considered a "classic". I was expecting a pleasant story for young adults on the level of Little House of the Prairie but was delightfully surprised to find serious adult literature that is easy to read. Stylistically it is American Realism with an emphasis on what it was like as a pioneer in Nebraska - this was the "boring part" at the beginning many people didn't like but I loved for the many small details of daily farm life. Cather said of its realism: "I decided not to 'write' at all, - simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I'd forgotten". And at first this is what it feels like, a novel as an excuse to reminisce about what it used to be like in the "old days" (say, 20 or 40 years prior). Cather's positive ecological message is also refreshing in a book this old and as important as ever. The books drab humorless tone - practical to a fault - artistically conveys the Norwegian pioneer world, but I hope not all her books are about Norwegians! I'm delighted to have this introduction to Willa Cather and look forward to reading more by her, she even has 3 volumes in the Library of America series.